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I listen to a lot of fusion players but I have not seen a path to learning how to play like them. I played rock and hard rock guitar for years as a teen and a substantial amount of time woodshedding solos so I have decent chops, but that began to bore me, so I got into jazz. I've learned the beginners vocabulary, took the jens larsen course online (great) and have been working through Randy Vincent's material. Its very good but very dense, it takes me a few passes to really understand it.
I saw advice on this forum to learn 40 jazz standards to become a jazz player who can gig. I don't want to gig, but I want to be able to play and improvise jazz fusion, which is a bit of a different style. Should I start with learning jazz standards to become a better player?? Is there a more efficient means of becoming a better fusion player?
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08-31-2022 12:08 PM
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There's a pretty rich spectrum of players who fall into the spectrum of fusion and it might help you to first of all understand what the idea of soloing is, know how harmony guides you to creating lines and for you to start training your ear to hear what your options are in playing based on chords.
You don't say what level you are but under fusion, you might find something closer to the rock end of the range, and find something in common.
There are things like Holdsworth that are pulling things from the Coltrane inspired lines that will take you longer to hear, years more to learn to creatively construct.
Like all of jazz, whether it's Lee Morgan or Miles Davis or Ben Monder, it's necessary for you to be able to hear harmony, know and play melody (lines) that work with a given harmonic landscape.
I do think that each genre has its own specialty and it may not serve you at this point to be transcribing Clifford Brown solos, but it certainly would make you a better player later on.
For starters, you might start with a form like the Blues or a one or two chord tune and try to understand just how you can play over it.
and once you've got the idea clear in your mind, begin with notes that work and start creating your OWN ideas about how to build tension, create phrasing, lines that have a start and an end and work on your own proficiency on the instrument which you'll surely need if you're going to make your way in the fusion pool.
Tell me a little about what you can do on the instrument, and if any of this makes sense.
Good luck and have fun!
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You must go into the desert with your guitar for 40 days and nights until you see God, and then apprehend this entire 5 hour YouTube video as vision from Beyond (wherein is my Goal)
Originally Posted by 0x3a29
Alternatively you could start by learning some fusion tunes and solos you like. Spain is a good’un.
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Well I listen a lot to guitarists like Holdsworth, Greg Howe, Scott Henderson, John Scofield, Shawn Lane, a lot of Simon Phillips projects, jeff lorber fusion. Over about 6 years I’ve gone through a lot of recommended tracks on Spotify and branched out from there. My job allows me to listen to music while I work so I listen to probably 40 hours of music a week so I’ve listened to a lot of what I get recommended. I really like Allan Holdsworth Hard Hat Area and the title track especially, I’ll have to give that album another listen. I agree it is hard for me to understand the meaning of the music or what the artist is trying to accomplish. Bitches Brew was not straightforward to me, I still don’t quite understand it.
Like I mentioned I have chops, I can play fast but only recently have really started to pay attention to harmony and rhythm as a first class component of music. I guess the issue is I spend my time learning vocabulary or trying to play riffs, I don’t actually improvise, learn standards, or play music in longer forms.
If you give me sheet music or tabs I can learn to play it, but I don’t really have my creative skills to a level that I want to get to.
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Use your ears. But start with something relatively simple; simple lines on a modal vamp for instance. Play lines on your guitar and understand what the harmonic context is. Don’t worry about writing them down. In this sense listening to Holdsworth play something like Play that Funky Music is more helpful at first than listening to him so on 16 men of tain; the context is easier to understand. You can do the lick thing of course, but try to get into working with musical ideas and seeing how you can alter them and change them up. Originally Posted by 0x3a29
To the larger musical community I’d say the core fusion guys are Herbie, Chick, Mike Stern/Bob Berg, the Yellowjackets, Brecker brothers, 80s Scofield, Weather Report, Tribal Tech/Henderson, Jeff Lorber. More recently you have Snarky Puppy, Lettieri etc. So it’s their repertoire that tends to get played live.
You’ll find some great tunes in there. They have a lot of charts in the Sher New Real books too. People play things like Spain, Inner Urge, Friday Night at the Cadillac Club, Revelation and Nothing Personal at fusion jams. Actual Proof is also a popular one but I would hesitate to call it a jam tune lol.
You can find all of those sorts of tunes in the NRBs alongside many more (and those NRB charts are really good.) Get into reading notation and use tab as little as possible.
I’d also suggest listening to horn players and keys as well as guitar for melodic ideas. you can’t go wrong transcribing Brecker.
I also think that it helps to have a solid foundation in bop vocabulary. A lot of the stuff is based on bop. Even Allan and Scott have a bit of it.Last edited by Christian Miller; 09-01-2022 at 03:16 AM.
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[ignore the 503 errors - the links are genuine and work]
Holdsworth has a few books: Just for the curious 503 - Service Unavailable Error
Searching for the uncommon chord: 503 - Service Unavailable Error
Melody chords for guitar: 503 - Service Unavailable Error - this one was actually written by his dad! But is still contains interesting stuff.
Use that stuff to write your own stuff.
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Ah. 'Fusion'. Like 'Latin'.
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Learn actual fusion tunes and try to learn their concept of harmony. It's different than traditional jazz so don't focus on standards unless you want to work on that too. As a rock player, you already have a good concept of rhythm and phrasing, so try to learn the harmony that they use.
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I’ll add that the video I post obstensibly in jest is the best analysis of Allan’s line playing that I’ve seen. But it’s also 5 hours long and I don’t think it’s a good jumping in point for the study of fusion guitar. Originally Posted by Rob MacKillop
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for me this is the fusion players motto:
" I used to be an anarchist..but gave it up..there were too many rules"
as in most styles of improvisation there are fundamental guides to use as a starting point
in traditional jazz..diatonic harmony/melody and its alterations would be one beginning point
In order to be proficient with the most basic tools..the study of scales major/minor and their harmonization
the chords produced from this study and all their inversions and alterations in all keys and positions
then the study of Melodic and Harmonic minor etc..their chords..inversions in all keys and positions
now some may say ..just play over the chords..and for some players this works just fine
listen to Miles Davis..the tune Blue in Green...learn it..harmony and melody..listen to what Coltrane and Bill Evans do with it..
if you can..record the harmony and play over it..see what happens
hope this helps
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As Hugo implies, “Jazz Fusion” is too vague.
Pick some specific players you like, and start listening (turn off your phone, put your guitar in the closet, and sit down - just listen). Maybe after a few dozen (hundred?) hours of just listening, get out a pencil and notepad and write down the players, albums, and tracks that really move you. Pick one track that seems accessible to you and learn it. Repeat.
Back in circa 1980, you didn’t have cred (in certain circles) as a fusion player unless you proved you could play over standard changes (Stern, Scofield, Abercrombie, McLaughlin), but who cares, screw that at this point, unless that’s a thing you really want to be able to do. I don’t see either option as a commercial or financial or career decision, since 99.14% of people don’t want to hear Fusion NOR straight-ahead jazz. So go with your artistic desire or passion, and skip playing Rhythm Changes in all keys - again, unless that’s what you want to be able to do.
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I've never seen a good book for jazz rock/fusion, but the one that comes close is by the great Rick Laird, bassist with the Mahavishnu Orchestra:
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So what make jazz fusion different from other styles of jazz? The harmonic progression? The use of different scales (i.e. the notes played)?
Or is it mostly just the sound? E.g. use of distortion, sustained notes, bending etc....
I have no idea, but wouldn't one have to have a general idea of the above in order to create a path to learning jazz fusion? (verses just learning to play jazz).
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Yes? I would say all of those things Originally Posted by jameslovestal
I would also say that fusion ime tends to be a bit more arranged than the average jazz blowing gig, and there’s often quite a lot to these tunes. But there is such a thing as arrangement heavy straightahead jazz, and if you learn straightahead tunes properly they often come with little arrangement details …. so….
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ox3x29, one thing to keep in mind, as a genre, fusion came from different places than mainstream jazz, so right from the beginning, even the first examples were created by restless young players well steeped in the traditions you might not hear the evidence, but it's down there and that was essential to the toolset they were working from. So in a big way, fusion's inception hit the ground running.
It helps to know what it was in rock music that they found valuable to throw into the first cauldron. Electric guitars with fast action that allowed them to play horn type speed lines over the harmony that they wanted to build upon. At the point that John McLaughlin (arguably the father of jazz fusion) recorded Inner Mounting Flame, there really wasn't anything like that. But he was a well seasoned jazz player who was steeped in the Miles Davis group, who's leader's musical identity went to the very earliest days of bebop, so McLaughlin pulled fusion out of a long tradition, even before his first note.
There are odd meters, modal scales derived from harmonic minor and exotic scales, driving rhythms from one of the most aggressive drummers to play with Miles and out of that, you can get an idea of what McLaughlin was jumping off from.
In a Silent Way and Jack Johnson had melodic and thematic material that showed up in Inner Mounting Flame. It'd be to your benefit to know those sessions. Columbia issued box sets of these complete sessions and the other very revealing studio time that didn't get released.
If you really want to know fusion, I highly recommend you familiarizing yourself with this period of Miles' carreer. Bitches Brew of course is a must. When you can somewhat understand McLaughlin, Corea, Clarke, Cobham, Herbie Hancock, all these seminal figures in fusion and what changed them, compelled them to create a new music and language out of this restless time in history, you can listen to Inner Mounting Flame and Birds of Fire and the Trident Sessions of the Mahavishnu Orchestra and I think you'll have an intelligent knowledge from which you can make valid opinions of what IS or ISN'T fusion, and more importantly, what you need to do to play it.
John McLaughlin Mahavishnu Orchestra
Chick Corea Return to Forever
Larry Coryell's Eleventh House
John Abercrombie Timeless
Tony Williams Lifetime
Weather Report
Billy Cobham's Spectrum with John Abercrombie and later with John Scofield
Gary Burton's recordings with Mick Goodrick and or Pat Metheny (to understand the incorporation of more complex harmonies into the soundscape).
All good sounds to immerse yourself in.
And ask questions. There's a lot of good knowledge here in a genre that isn't written about a lot but a lot of us here have lived through it and understand it in insightful ways.
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The only way to fix this is to suffer with time on the instrument as you bumble through things that sound bad. Then You’ll think you sound really good for a while, then you’ll realize you actually sounded better when you had no idea what you were doing, but you’ve stepped out of the cave and there is no going back in. Note you know you can do better, you can come up with lines for days in your head or singing them, but won’t be able to wrangle it from the instrument. Originally Posted by 0x3a29
That’s been my first 4 years “learning to play jazz”.
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Not much guitar in Weather Report. I can’t think of any.
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Ralph Towner played with that band on I Sing The Body Electric with Miraslav Vitous if I'm not mistaken. Towner plays guitar. Originally Posted by Bach5G
But the way that band changed the scene, the writing and the way Jaco rewrote the book of the rhythm section, you don't think that is worth knowing in anybody's desire to know what fusion is? Wayne Shorter's use of line, even from the time of Miles Smiles set the stage for an entirely new use of soloing phrasing. One of the ways fusion is markedly different from more traditional jazz is linear phrasing, the longer line that marks guitaristic sound. That comes a lot from Shorter and what better way to understand that quantum break in the sound of jazz than Shorter's brainchild Weather Report.
But yeah, it it's too deep, do feel free to scratch that one off the list. But it was essential to me when I was immersed in fusion. As an incidental aside, there was a point where Weather Report was going to bring John Scofield into that band. It was a great idea and they were all aboard, but record company tangles saw to it that that never happened.
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I also think it's a good idea to listen to the music that spawned fusion. Nefertiti for EG, and the other Miles albums directly before Silent Way. It's the melting pot. There can be no doubt that Miles is the Chef and Father. Originally Posted by Jimmy blue note
It's also a good idea to learn how to play funk. Listen to James Brown's rhythm section on something like Say it Loud. Check out that base line, and how the guitars work with that. Now listen to Live Evil and On the Corner. And Sly Stone for more of it. I know I don't have to mention Jimi, right? But I'm talking about the funk side of it just now. It's a major ingredient.
The rhythm and feel are everything, whether it's rock, funk, or Johnny Mac's odd-ball meters. And World Music in general. Hindewhu in Head Hunter's Watermelon. Brazilian and African in every percussionist who ever played with any of these guys. Even guys like Zakir bring the funk.
I don't think this matters much:
I say this as a guitar player who was playing all this music when it was happening, and seeing most of these guys in concert when possible.Not much guitar in Weather Report. I can’t think of any.
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Why is that important? Originally Posted by Bach5G
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I don’t really think of 70s Miles as fusion, certainly not in the same way as the Tony Williams New Lifetime or Mahavishnu. Live/Evil is one of my favourites and it couldn’t be further from the polished shredding over vamps that is called ‘fusion’ today.
But for those raised on the slick sounds of 80s fusion and later I would certainly recommend Tony William’s ‘Believe It’ with early Allan rocking out on some great tunes. The album that invented Joe Satriani’s guitar style (Joe admits it haha.) Great band too, I like that a lot of the fusion bass players before Jaco where real Motown guys. Added a lot of grit and groove. Jaco had that too of course, but not so much his army of imitators who copied the chops without the greasy feel.
(Interestingly according to Allan, Jaco auditioned for Tony’s band but didn’t get the gig… probably both of them too much for one rhythm section!)
It’s very much in Herbies 70s music… Thrust, Manchild etc etc.
Anyway early jazz/rock crossover is often a lot more free flowing. Early Weather Report too. The Old Lifetime (so to speak)
I suppose you could add 60s Cannonball Adderly and Charles Lloyd to the ‘formative influences’ mix as Miles, err, ‘harvested’ those bands for personnelLast edited by Christian Miller; 09-02-2022 at 03:49 AM.
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I suppose if you’re looking for the path to learning fusion guitar, it might help to listen to who have already travelled that path.
As much as I like WR (a lot).
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In any music, learning the vocabulary is the first step. Music is a language, and jazz fusion is a particular language.
Start at the beginning and listen to "Duster" by Gary Burton. Work your way forward to hear all that may inspire your own journey.
You should also try to have absorb jazz guitar from Charlie Christian on and Blues/rock guitar from T-Bone walker on.
There are many miles to go, but as has been said, a thousand mile journey begins with a single step.
Good luck.
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Or fire up a Scott Henderson album.
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